Can the Harry Potter fandom carry on while ignoring J.Ok. Rowling?

Harry Potter is really the fandom that lived. Hogwarts Legacy, the newest big-budget entry in the 26-year-old franchise, grossed over $1 billion as of May, promoting 15 million copies — regardless of various shops declining to cowl it, citing Harry Potter creator J.Ok. Rowling’s historical past of constructing transphobic statements. It’s extremely rated by gamers and helps a thriving ecosystem of streamers and followers. Likewise, the award-winning Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage play has damaged information for weekly grosses round the world. The franchise is even getting a TV reboot.

Despite quite a few newer additions to the franchise, together with the newest underperforming installment of the Fantastic Beasts spinoff collection, the core canon of the authentic books and flicks continues to be the middle of the lives of lots of of 1000’s of followers. In numerous corners of the web, sequestered from uncaring or judgmental eyes by bespoke algorithms and obscure codenames, Harry Potter followers are thriving — producing as many fan works as ever, with that very same acquainted fever pitch I bear in mind from my days ready in line for the subsequent ebook launch.

Dipping a toe again into HP fandom for the first time in years can, for a fan of the old style, show a little bit disorienting. The depth of up to date followers’ obsession is fully acquainted, and but additionally bewildering. These followers are transport characters I don’t bear in mind being canon (who’s Daphne Greengrass?!) or writing fic in the type of TikTok video snippets, voiced by a practical ElevenLabs AI of Tom Felton’s Draco Malfoy.

Yet this persistence is proof of simply how exhausting it’s to kill a fandom. Even as some followers have identified the weak factors of the collection’ world-building — comparable to the incomprehensibility of the places of the world’s wizarding faculties — the fictional universe has continued. A fandom is its personal complete world, in spite of everything, populated by concepts and inhabited by people who find themselves looking for these treasured issues: consolation and group. Decades’ price of emotional and inventive inertia can’t be halted simply.

It could be less complicated, after all, if Rowling wasn’t round to play a component in actively souring her status, even amongst her most loyal followers. Then the fan dialogue could possibly be about the best way to reclaim the authentic collection from a post-hoc perspective, the best way to rebuild from the floor up, because it had been. Instead, there’s an extremely energetic ongoing tug-of-war between Rowling and her followers. As Rowling has voiced help on social media for anti-trans activists, and personally funded causes together with a trans-excluding ladies’s shelter, followers have responded by boycotting the magical franchise and calling out those that nonetheless take part in the fandom. At the finish of the day, this implies lots of people who in any other case would like to spend time in the Wizarding World are reluctant to take action.

It’s straightforward to imagine that as we speak’s Harry Potter followers — the ones who’ve remained energetic or lately joined up — know about the connotations their public fandom practices have in 2023, after three years of Rowling making extremely public feedback towards trans rights. But that’s not essentially true. Everyone, it appears, has “that one offline friend” who’s nonetheless seemingly fortunately naive about the bigger political context of their Potter ardour. Many of the followers I got here throughout in my reporting didn’t appear in any respect troubled by the battle.

Even if these followers did know and had an opinion on it, the way it affected their degree of participation different. Some mentioned that they don’t have management of what they obsess over, and that they need to be allowed to love what they like; others have efficiently compartmentalized their fandom-centric actions from the franchise by numerous means; nonetheless others have mentioned they don’t actually care.

I’m sympathetic — while I personally don’t suppose I’d have the ability to absolutely immerse myself in Harry Potter fandom once more, I however nonetheless really feel a robust connection to it because of my longtime childhood obsession, robust sufficient that I at all times find yourself holding an eye fixed on it, fascinated by its ever-sprawling mass, and unable to conclusively condemn those that proceed to participate.

The Marauders

Image: Warner Bros./Everett Collection

So a lot of as we speak’s Harry Potter fandom isn’t based mostly on the story that seems in the books, films, and stage performs. The largest phase of enthusiastic progress, as demonstrated on social media, revolves round the Marauders period — the time interval at Hogwarts a era earlier than Harry bought there, that includes the titular group of his father James, James’ bestie Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew. (These 4 created the Marauder’s Map throughout their time at Hogwarts — Harry obtains this identical map in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.)

Fans solely briefly glimpsed this “prequel” period in flashbacks in the books and flicks. But it has lengthy held enchantment as a fertile playground for followers to think about the lives of witches and wizards of a sepia-toned Before, in the halcyon days earlier than the First Wizarding War kicked off the fundamental occasions of the collection.

The Marauders — the characters and the period on the whole — have loved recognition since the days of The Shoebox Project. This LiveJournal-hosted fic grew to become immensely well-liked round 2005-2007, and was many a millennial’s first publicity to the Remus/Sirius ship, known as Wolfstar. Ben Barnes was even compelled to remark this 12 months throughout promotion for Shadow and Bone on the ubiquity of his “fancasting” as younger Sirius.

A brand new era of followers have flocked to the Marauders at unprecedented ranges. The new Marauders period is exemplified by All the Young Dudes, a 526,000-word fanfic that, for a while, reigned supreme at the prime of all fics on Archive of Our Own sorted by hits. It has since been dethroned, most notably by viral Minecraft YouTuber fic Heat Waves, however stays the prime Harry Potter fic of all time, and an enormous affect on this newest wave of fandom.

The fic was written by consumer MsKingBean89 someday between 2017 and 2018. But it didn’t attain a peak of recognition till the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when followers had been returning to previous fandoms looking for acquainted comforts, and studying novel-length fics while in lockdown. The story follows the Marauders by their time at Hogwarts from Lupin’s viewpoint; it’s primarily canon-compliant, apart from a change in Lupin’s backstory that had him rising up in an orphanage and with a much more traumatic youth than in canon.

Writer and journalist Ashley Reese has been persistently energetic in Harry Potter fan communities for almost twenty years, and has noticed firsthand the shifts in the Marauders subcommunity as younger new followers enter the fandom.

“[All the Young Dudes] has pretty much been elevated to a kind of canon, fanon, whatever you want to call it, level — to this extent to which even though I haven’t read the entire fic, I know enough about it now,” she says. Characterizations from ATYD, comparable to a barely edgier Remus Lupin, have seeded themselves all through as we speak’s Marauders works like a fast-growing mycelium.

When Ryan Broderick and I interviewed ATYD’s writer, the pseudonymous MsKingBean89, in 2021 for the web tradition publication Garbage Day, she commented on the phenomenon of ATYD readers seeing the large, sprawling story as a “replacement” for the precise canon of Harry Potter, absolving them of their uncomfortable closeness to Rowling.

“I didn’t come in to say, ‘no, I’m a better writer than anyone.’ Or, ‘I want to replace J.K. Rowling, I want to present to you an unproblematic Harry Potter universe,’” she advised us at the time. “Because I’m not capable of doing that. I’m just a person who was really intensively writing for a year and a half and maybe should have been doing other things.”

She has since retreated from the fandom, and different authors and creators have taken her place in the highlight, each increasing the Marauders sub-fandom and popularizing different ships. The Draco/Hermione ship has skilled a swell of recognition in the AO3-centric aspect of the fandom, forefronted by the book-length, Handmaid’s Tale-inspired Manacled fanfiction. It additionally options closely in the fanbinding aspect of TikTok, the place followers print out and bind tales with a view to have their very own bodily copies of beloved fic.

Fan refugees

Image: Warner Bros./Everett Collection

Transformative fan works — that’s, fiction and artwork made by followers that make inventive use of an current canon’s world and characters — can really feel like a refuge and a reclamation, and a approach for followers to proceed to take part in a beloved universe with out giving a dime to its dastardly creator. Amid snappy edits stuffed with fancasts and fan-made Harry Potter quick movies on TikTok, a big group of devoted readers make movies discussing their favourite fan-written tales as in the event that they had been self-contained canons themselves.

These tales may be discovered in lots of locations, and are made up of many alternative well-liked genres. Harry Potter is one in all the hottest classes on adolescent-dominated fiction platform Wattpad, the place Mary Sues and self-inserts flirt with Draco and mingle with Marvel characters (who’re abruptly additionally at Hogwarts?) in tales with thousands and thousands of views. On extra mature fic platform AO3, HP fic has lengthy reigned in a secure second place, after Marvel, for whole variety of fics.

The Marauders are simply far sufficient from Harry Potter correct for followers to really feel some possession of the parts of the world that they performed a component in creating. And extra lately well-liked ships have leaned additional into this radical distance from the authentic collection canon. The Jegulus (James Potter/Regulus Black) ship, for instance, has exploded in recognition over the previous few years, going from 42 works posted on AO3 in 2019 to just about 9,000 works posted in 2023 thus far, as of mid-July. In fics posted in the previous 12 months, it’s the fifth hottest ship, beneath juggernauts Draco/Harry and Draco/Hermione, however above canon pairings Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny.

Regulus Black is Sirius Black’s youthful brother, a personality who in canon is simply identified for changing into an enthusiastic Death Eater as a youngster, solely to betray Voldemort after a change of coronary heart and die as a consequence. James Potter, Harry’s father, is after all fated to be with Lily. But followers have embraced a hypothetical romance between James and Regulus, normally in live performance with Sirius/Remus. A thriving Regulus fan group on TikTok has embraced the edgy goth teen as “the Loki of the Marauders,” turning an unsympathetic however intriguing background character right into a sultry heartthrob, normally forged as Timothée Chalamet.

The Jegulus ship first emerged as a traditional rarepair origin story, with an identifiable Patient Zero place to begin, in response to Reese. A pal group of All the Young Dudes TikTokers thought it might be enjoyable to advertise Jegulus as a performative in-joke, with a recurring punchline about Regulus’ canonical dying by drowning (“fascists don’t float,” per screenshots of now-deleted movies). Naturally what started as ironic rapidly grew to become honest as followers exterior of the pal group took the ship and ran with it earnestly, turning James and Regulus’ unlikely and doomed romance into one thing 1000’s of readers at the moment are acquainted with and longing for extra of.

“People babygirlify these characters in a way that is really strange to me,” says Reese, reflecting on previous eras of fandom, “because I used to really only see fans woobify characters like Snape or Draco, who we actually see on the page.”

While followers have at all times made use of minor or background characters in canon to refill their fan works, Harry Potter fandom’s use of shared fanon is extra of a up to date phenomenon. Instead of every writer giving their very own interpretation of Regulus Black or Marlene McKinnon based mostly on canon, they adapt instantly from different fan works — useful, maybe, for many who need to chorus from returning to the books and flicks, however who don’t need to abandon the Potterverse wholesale.

The fandom’s future

Image: Warner Bros./Everett Collection

It could also be that newer generations of Harry Potter followers have self-selected, which is to say that significantly social-justice-minded younger individuals would avoid what has change into such a controversial franchise. Perhaps the present fan communities are merely populated with individuals who don’t see the political and social context round a piece as a barrier to enjoyment.

That’s to not say the Harry Potter fandom is full of individuals who agree with Rowling’s feedback about trans individuals, or that followers want the racially homogenous Wizarding World of the authentic books. Trends in fan works over the previous few years belie that declare — comparable to the transfer towards devoted illustration in fanfic, and the nearly common embrace of queer and numerous headcanons for characters, together with Harry Potter himself, who’s continuously headcanoned as being of Indian descent.

“It feels like overcorrecting, or a way to feel less guilty about playing with the TERF’s characters, in a way. Like a sense of rebellion: I’m going to go as far away from the canon as I can because this woman’s awful,” Reese proposes.

The continued success of the theme parks, video video games, and theater parts of the franchise show that there’s nonetheless curiosity in Harry Potter because it was initially written. So the announcement of the brand-new HBO collection, masking the identical well-trod floor as the authentic films, appeared kind of inevitable.

The actual query is: Will Rowling ever construct out the Marauders period, or adapt it on display screen? On the one hand, it looks like a slam-dunk no-brainer. But not all followers are essentially keen on seeing it lastly change into a actuality after so lengthy — particularly those that have purposefully ensconced themselves in a world of fanon distant from something produced by Warner Bros. and that can revenue Rowling. Parallel to their standing in canon as a prewar idyll, the Marauders — and Wolfstar, Jegulus, Snily, and the relaxation — signify a model of Harry Potter that followers have explored extra freely and with out a lot of the fraught situations that weigh on different components of the fandom.